~ juggling life with style

Category Archives: Holidays

As in many families, the Christmas traditions in my birth family have evolved over the course of my three-and-a-half decades as our family has grown, adding spouses and significant others and a few littles. But some things remain unchanged, like our Polish Christmas Eve dinner. Mom is 100% Polish, and while most of her offspring don’t crave sauerkraut the way she does, we all enjoy this holiday meal.

Our menu consists of potato pancakes with lox, pirogues, cocktail shrimp, and salad. The first two items are non-negotiable. I should know. I’m in charge of the pancakes these days, and when I threaten to go on strike, my family suddenly decides to shower me with accolades and assistance. You see, prepping and frying up enough pancakes for our party of 18 takes right around two hours, and the meal is inhaled in about 20. After those two hours at the stove, my feet are reminded once again of that first painful week working retail.

You can find our potato pancake recipe in the fabulous Colorado Collage cookbook (which I highly recommend for a multitude of recipes—and keep in mind that I cook as infrequently as possible).

Potato Pancakes:

• Peel and shred an appropriate amount of potatoes for your crowd (we do 20 pounds, but I think 15 would cover us).
• Squeeze out as much of the potato water as you can while shaping into flat pancakes roughly 3” in diameter.
• Fry in hot oil. Once you’ve started a few pancakes in the pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper.
• If you’re cooking for a large crowd, keep the cooked pancakes warm in an oven set to 200°.
• When ready to serve, top with a dollop of sour cream, a twist of smoked salmon, and a sprinkling of chopped green onions.
• Enjoy them while they’re hot! They won’t stick around long.

What holiday traditions do you enjoy? I’d love to hear about them. Maybe we’ll add some new ones next year.

With Easter coming up this week, I thought it would be fun to share what my parents bravely did for their eight children each Easter Eve. As you can imagine in a family of ten, Easter baskets could take up a ton of room and cash, so early on they thought up a brilliant alternative.

Photo by Tina Phillips, courtesy of FreeDigistalPhotos.net

Now, hold on before you decide to judge. While it may sound creepy, this is actually one of my favorite holiday memories. (And just to be fair, some people call it a yarn maze, but spider web sounds much more interesting.)

After most of us were tucked into bed (or confined to our rooms, in later years), Mom and Dad would spend an hour or two and eight different colors of yarn to create a fantastic spider web throughout the main floor of my childhood home. Leaving each ball of yarn at the top of the steps, they went to bed knowing that any child who attempted to go downstairs before the appointed time would risk losing their Easter gift.

When I asked my mom last week where they came up with this idea, she told me this was how her freshman group of sorority sisters found their big sister. Count on my mom to think it’s appropriate to play sorority games with her children on a religious holiday, but whatever.

Since many of these mazes were made back in the day of actual film (the first was created in the late eighties), I sadly cannot find a photo from my childhood. But about eight or so years ago a friend and I decided to reenact the maze for my youngest siblings. This was when I discovered that creating the web is perhaps more fun than navigating one.

So if you’re game, grab enough yarn colors for each participant (or if you’re mean, enough skeins of the same color), some super fun gifts for the end of the web, and make this Easter hunt one of your most memorable.